x and them

[Benjamin Lukoff]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Peter A. McGraw wrote:

> Let's take this thread in a different direction.
> A similar expression to "X and them" is "Xs" or "X's" (I'm not sure which
> it is).  Thus a great aunt of mine in Iowa (who had lived on a farm all her
> life) referred to her son and his family as "Dales" (or "Dale's"?).  I've
> never heard it anywhere else, but when I mentioned it as a curiosity to a
> female colleague in Dayton, Ohio, who was something of a feminist, she
> said, "Oh, yes--I just hate that!" indicating at least that it probably
> wasn't restricted to Iowa.  (This colleague had grown up in Albuquerque,
> NM, but lived most of her adult life in urban Ohio.)
> Does anybody know more about the geography of this, or whether the /-s/ is
> plural or possessive?

I don't know anything about the geography of this construction, but I can
give you another data point: my girlfriend does this, and she's from Port
Orchard, Washington (near Seattle).  Her intuition is that it is a plural,
not a possessive.  I would tend to agree.